MOSCOW—The father of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects said he was present at the family house in Cambridge, Mass., when the FBI interviewed his older son in 2011.

Anzor Tsarnaev, speaking with The Wall Street Journal via telephone from Makhachkala in Russia's Republic of Dagestan, said Federal Bureau of Investigation agents came to talk to his older son, Tamerlan, as a "person of interest."

Essay

"Yes, I was there. Of course I was there," Mr. Tsarnaev said. "It was in Cambridge. 410 Norfolk Street, Cambridge."

He said U.S. authorities visited the house for what he described as "prevention" activities that involved Tamerlan. "They said: We know what sites you are on, we know where you are calling, we know everything about you. Everything," Mr. Tsarnaev recalled. "They said we are checking and watching—that's what they said."

The father of the pair said he wasn't nervous that the FBI showed up at his home. "I knew what he was doing, where he was going. I raised my children right," he said of his sons.

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He said he is sure Tamerlan and his brother Dzhokhar must have been framed for the Boston bombing. "This is all lies. These are my children. I know my children," Mr. Tsarnaev said. He said his own brother, Ruslan, called his sons "losers" in an American television interview Friday because of a family feud.

ENLARGE

Anzor Tsarnaev, father of brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnayev speaks with media in his home, Makhachkala, Russia, April 19..
European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Tsarnaev said he was also on hand when Tamerlan visited Makhachkala for a few months last year. "He wasn't occupied with anything. He was just visiting relatives," he recounted. Asked if it was possible Tamerlan encountered Muslim fundamentalists while in Dagestan, he said there was no way. "There aren't even any of those here anymore," Mr. Tsarnaev said. He said his son, who married and had a child with an American named Katherine, had recently become more religious and started to pray.

He also said it was impossible that his children's alleged crimes could have been tied to radical Islam. "What kind of Islam? In Islam we have purity," he said. "We do what we're supposed to. We pray five times a day. That's it. Because people are supposed to pray—you, and us, and everyone."

He also mentioned a domestic assault that Tamerlan had carried out in his past but brushed it off as a minor incident that involved the son's first girlfriend. The father also sketched out a bit of the family history: Though he is an ethnic Chechen, Mr. Tsarnaev grew up in Kyrgyzstan because his parents were sent there under a mass deportation of Chechens during the Stalin era. He said he moved to Chechnya with his family for a year in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, but quickly returned to Kyrgyzstan after disliking the situation in his ethnic homeland.

Then the family left Kyrgyzstan in 1999 to move to Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, which borders Chechnya. Ms. Tsarnaeva's family—who are Avars, one of the largest ethnic groups in Dagestan—come from Makhachkala. The family left a few years later for the U.S.

Mr. Tsarnaev said he returned to Dagestan a year ago because he is very sick. "It's a bad prognosis," he said.

Corrections & Amplifications Anzor Tsarnaev said he moved to Chechnya for about a year with his family in 1992. Due to a translation error, an earlier version of this article incorrectly said the family moved in 1994.

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